The “Watson” Poems by Michael Pettit

Even an author can become a character in someone else’s work and imagination. A long-time friend of Brad Watson’s, accomplished poet Michael Pettit, has been writing “Watson poems” since the days when both were in graduate school in creative writing at the University of Alabama, and Pettit, his life in transition, was spending nights on Watson’s couch. In a comparably transitional frame of mind, Watson was considering leaving graduate school and becoming a navy fighter pilot. Thus the genesis of “Blue Angel,” reprinted below. Over time, however, like most fictional characters, Pettit’s “Watson” began to take on an independent life of his own. (Unlike Pettit’s Watson and Watson’s Finus, the author of The Heaven of Mercury was never assigned to a newspaper’s obit page.)

PERDIDO KEY

Watson’s found work, like a dime on a sunny street,
a happy accident. Salaried, living by the sea,

Not Watson, headed out into it, ace reporter
on assignment: Our weather plane lumbers
through skies heavy as the heavy deep sea below.

The pilots lean into their instruments,
the navigator whispers numbers,
the weatherman’s eyes widen.

So what if he doesn’t return, so what
if this great storm scatters Watson’s little plane
and he never makes its eye—that balmy paradise—

but spins over the wet, windswept world
for the short remainder of his life, howling
something we down here will hear as the wild,

wild wind. So what if Watson’s blown away.
It’s his birthday and he wants it, bad,
so why not, why the hell not, let him have it.

BLUE ANGEL

It goes time, indolence, boredom,
depression and Watson figures his way out
is at twice the speed of sound. It’s booze
tonight though, sitting home with thoughts
of Navy jets, Mach II, and the blues
he’ll leave behind like the sudden sonic boom

that shatters the farmer’s rain gauges,
drives his milk cows and wife crazy.
Watson uncorks his bottle, already over
the next flat state, delighted and busy
doing a swift 1,500 miles per hour.
Glassy-eyed, he turns the pages

of a glossy book: F-104 Starfighters,
the XP-86 Sabre jet, an F-4 Phantom.
Behind each dark-tinted canopy
he sees his own face: composed, handsome,
heroic. And it’s there amid the debris
of an airshow disaster, the four fires

on the desert, the four perfect black
columns of smoke. O to be a Blue Angel
burning, becoming wholly and finally air!
Watson knows how, step by step, the soul
can die in the living body. He’ll make sure
they go together, and when they do, go quick.

From Blue Angel: Being the Sacred and Profane Life and Times of Watson, Founded on Fact, by Michael Pettit. Copyright Michael Pettit. (“Blue Angel” and “Hurricane Watson” first appeared in the Indiana Review.)